Sisters of Yorali
RYARAN’S MEMORY STONE
It came in pieces the way memories did when they were not your own. I was standing in Yorali. The palace was vast and silver-blue, the corridors wide and cold and precise. I could hear water somewhere.
It was King Orsin’s palace, and it smelled familiar because my mind had been here before when I had dreamt of the horrors of the yellow room and the North Tower and the bloody sheets.
My mother was young. That was the first thing that struck me. She was younger than I had imagined her and moved through the corridors of the Yorali palace with the ease of someone who had not yet learned to be careful. Beside her was a woman I recognized even from behind.
Jularin.
They were laughing about something. I could not hear what. The memory did not give me sound, only image and feeling, the emotional texture of a moment rather than its words. What I felt from them was lightness. Excitement.
Then the King of Yorali appeared.
King Orsin. He was handsome. That was the honest truth of it and the memory did not spare me from it.
Younger and more charming than he had been in my nightmare.
He was charming, the kind of presence that stole a room, and I watched Jularin's face when she saw him and understood everything that would follow from that single unguarded moment.
Ryaran saw it too.
I could feel her worry even through the distance of the memory. She watched her sister and said nothing. The silence was its own kind of grief.
The memory carried me into a circular chamber lined with books and silver instruments I did not recognize. Three old mages stood around a worktable while my mother carefully unwrapped an amulet from a length of blue cloth. Even before I saw it clearly I knew what it was.
This must be the key, or something close to it. I wondered if the necklace itself was the key, or if the one strong enough to wield it was the key.
One of the mages lifted it with surprising reverence. "There is power sleeping inside this," he murmured.
“So I have been told,” Ryaran answered. “Though most cannot wake it.”
The oldest mage looked between the sisters. He turned the pendant slowly in his hands. "If awakened incorrectly it could become something very dangerous."
Ryaran reached for it immediately. "Then leave it sleeping."
He nodded and wrapped it carefully back in the cloth. "We'll continue our study tomorrow."
The memory lurched.
Night. Ryaran slept. Moonlight stretched across the floor. Jularin stood beside the bed and watched her sister for a long time. Then she quietly reached beneath the pillow. The blue cloth emerged in her hands. She hesitated only once before she left.
The next room glowed with candlelight. King Orsin waited alone. He smiled before she had spoken a word.
"You came."
"I brought it." She unfolded the cloth.
His eyes fixed on the pendant and for the first time since I had entered this memory I saw what was underneath the charm and the attention and the careful smiles. Want. Pure and focused and patient, the kind that had been waiting a long time.
"You said your mages could awaken it," Jularin said.
"They can." He stepped closer and reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "And when they do, Alarna will never fear another war."
She laughed softly. "I knew you would help."
He kissed her forehead. "I'll protect everything you love."
She placed the pendant in his hand. He closed his fingers around it and the smile on his face changed. Barely. Enough. Jularin did not notice.
I did.
Then he reached into a carved wooden box resting next to him and withdrew a silver pin set with a pale stone unlike anything she had seen. At first glance it looked milky white, but when it caught the light, something beneath its surface shifted.
"Paravin," he said. "The only stone of its kind ever taken from the mines of Yorali."
He reached over and fastened it at her temple himself.
"So long as it is worn, it stands as a symbol of your loyalty to the Crown of Yorali."
Jularin's fingers rose to the stone, lingering there for a moment.
"I will cherish it," she said softly.
Color touched her cheeks. Orsin noticed.
He smiled.
"I suspect you will."
The next morning. Ryaran stood outside the council chamber.
"The royal mages are examining it," Orsin said pleasantly.
"Examining?"
"We detected irregularities."
"I would like it returned."
"You will. As soon as they've determined it poses no danger." He walked away.
My mother watched him disappear down the corridor.
She already knew.
She would never ask him for it again.
Men like Orsin did not surrender the things they wanted.
The memory shifted.
Several months later. The same palace but different somehow.
Jularin had not left.
I found my mother in a corridor, alone, holding something small in her hands. A pendant. She turned it over once and then pressed it against her chest and closed her eyes and her face did the thing faces did when they were deciding something they had already decided and needed to finish deciding.
She had come back.
She had left and come back and I understood why without being told. Jularin was not herself. I could see that the moment the memory brought me to her. She sat in a room that was too small and too quiet with a child in her arms. Another child slept in a cradle beside her.
She had given birth just days ago. She should have been elsewhere, somewhere warmer, somewhere that smelled less like silver and cold water.
He had not attempted to siphon Jularin because he knew she was not the key. But he had been draining her lightcraft all the same. The toll of it was written plainly across her face.
The servants whispered in the corner.
"She will be taken to the North Tower soon."
"Twelve coins says she gets the yellow room," another said quietly.
My mother crossed the room, sat beside her sister, and took her hand. She did not speak for a long time.
It was the morning of the wedding.
I did not want to watch this part, but I watched anyway.
My mother in a gown that was not hers, standing in a room that was not meant for her, the king announcing to a hall full of Yorali court that Ryaran of Alarna would be his wife. Not Jularin, who had just borne his children. Ryaran.
I knew without anyone saying it aloud that the king could not resist. My mother bore the same Mark of Forizan on her chest as I did. She was more beautiful than Jularin. Moreover, she was the Queen Heir. She could provide him with power and access.
I watched Jularin's face.
The fury first. Raw and immediate and real, the face of someone who had given everything and been told it was not enough.
Then, and this was the part that broke something in me, the understanding that moved through her slowly.
Her sister's name in the king's mouth. The gown.
The expression on Ryaran's face that was not happiness and had never been happiness.
Jularin understood.
She had always been the clever one. That was what the memory told me, in the way memories told you things that were true without saying them directly. She understood what her sister had done and why and what it was going to cost her, and she sat in that hall and did not make a sound.
The king turned to Jularin, smug, looking at her as though she were vermin.
“The children may return to Alarna, but make no mistake. I do not intend to claim them, they will be nameless bastards. Should I need them for their magic I will use them as I do all my bastards. And should you deny me, my deathmages will find a way to crawl through Alarna’s wards and take them from you, alive or dead. ”
My mother stood. “Let me adopt them,” she said. “Let me raise them as my own. Legitimize them through me.”
Jularin looked anguished but my mother's eyes met hers and said everything that needed to be said.
Later, they were in a corridor. Just the two of them.
Ryaran held her sister's hands, begging her to promise to stick to the plan. Jularin's face did everything at once, grief and guilt and the anguish of someone being asked to leave behind the people they love because staying would only make it worse.
Two small children sleeping in a room nearby.
Jularin's hands shook as she packed what little she had brought. She turned to Ryaran and said quietly. “Ivanoxa and Tamal. You must raise them to be kind like me, but strong like you."
Ryaran grabbed her hand one more time. “Alarna. My brother. Axar, they must all believe it was for foolishness, for love. You must sell that lie."
Jularin nodded.
Ryaran said nothing else and watched her go.
Jularin paused in the corridor and reached into her cloak. She pulled out the Paravin pin that Orsin had given her.
I thought she was going to leave it in the palace. Or perhaps throw it out the window.
She stared at it. Then placed it on with trembling hands and resumed walking.
The last image was my mother's face after Jularin had turned the corner and was gone.
She stood in the empty corridor of the Yorali palace and she looked at the wall and her expression was the most honest thing I had ever seen on anyone's face.
The quiet of someone who had made a choice they could not unmake and had decided to carry it cleanly.
Then she turned and walked back toward the sound of the wedding.
The memory dissolved.
I opened my eyes to the ceiling of the guest chamber in Morrath and lay there for a moment without moving, the stone still warm in my palm, my chest doing something I did not have a name for.
My whole life I had been called a whore’s daughter, told that my mother was of no value. My family in Alarna had seemed convinced that my mother stupidly fell in love. They did not know that she had walked into his court to save her sister and had never walked back out again.
Moreover, Tamal and Ivanoxa. I thought of Ivanoxa's gold eyes, of how strange my intunar had felt pressed against her.
Of course it did.
We were sisters.